Whenever she met someone new, she wondered what the relationship would be: Fleeting, a pleasant hour or two over a drink to be soon forgotten? Or a major influence on her life, on her way of thinking (and thinking about the world)? How would she enter his orbit? How might he affect hers? Would they be like billiard balls, that strike and kiss and shoot off in another direction? Or would the connection be more magnetic, something elastic but with great attraction, so that for a time, at least, they would not, could not break away?

Their relationship, as it developed, exhibited a strong gravitational pull. She would email him throughout the day, and become agitated when he did not answer immediately; and then she would wonder, why should he feel compelled? After all, they had never met, never exchanged names nor photographs. They hadn’t shared physical descriptions of any sort. All they had done was write, inventing characters and places as they went, each surprising the other with a new chapter (and sometimes several) each day as they took turns with the virtual pen and paper.

The correspondence continued for years, and she found that it was a more intimate relationship than she had ever known before. When she went away on vacation, she counted the days until her return; friends and family would ask what was wrong, why did she not seem herself? She found herself resenting her own mate, who had none of the qualities he had (or that she imagined he had). When at last they met, she saw that he wasn’t at all what she had imagined. Rather, he was a woman, tallish but slightly built, feminine in her mannish clothes and straw hat. They walked in the summer rain, enjoyed tea together and shopping for antiquarian books, then ducked into a hotel bar for a drink. Before long they were upstairs, two middle-aged straight women who had, suddenly and without warning, found each other and the absent passions they had long ago dismissed as chimerical.

In the morning she returned to her husband and children, forever changed. She couldn’t bear to leave them, but she knew she couldn’t stay with them, either. The world, her world, no longer made sense to her, and she knew she had to find the proper orbit for herself: what she needed was not the planetary pull of husband and family, but something at once more subtle and more extreme. Yesterday she had experienced, for the first time, what it was like for two people to truly orbit each other, for both to be main actors, neither one just a minor moon reflecting the other’s light. She needed that, and would cut herself off from everyone and everything if that’s what it took to reclaim it.

She would start this morning, she decided, as soon as children were off to school and husband to work. Her first order of business would be to discover her true love’s name.